6 Things I Expect at IDF

SAN JOSE, Calif. – As I write this article, Brian Krzanich is reviewing demos for his second annual keynote at the Intel Developer Forum, the biggest event of the world’s biggest chipmaker. So all the details of what gets announced and what doesn’t are still TBD, but it’s looking as if, sans surprises, he won’t have the biggest headlines of the day.

Krzanich will be taking the stage about the same time Tim Cook is expected to hold up the iPhone 6 -- and maybe an iWatch and an iPhablet -- at an event just down the street. Apple’s chief executive is likely to command most of the attention next week for systems that won’t have x86 chips inside them.

Krzanich held up the first Quark CPU for IoT at IDF 2013.

1. Quark gets traction in IoTAt his first IDF last year Krzanich got his share of the limelight for announcing Quark, a Pentium-class processor, targeting the Internet of Things. This year Intel’s CEO needs to show Quark is getting some traction, and that’s expected to be one of his central themes.

Krzanich already showed Quark riding an Arduino board for the Maker community. Expect more focus on Maker IoT markets at IDF. Another IoT focus will be wearables such as the Open Ceremony bracelet Intel announced at the New York Fashion Week and expected to go on sale later this year. A few robots may even troop across the IDF stage to rally for Quark.

It’s all good theater, but not big news.

“If you go to a conference today and they don’t talk about IoT you are probably not on this planet,” says Nathan Brookwood, principal of market watcher Insight64, of Saratoga, Calif. “It seems like Intel will mainly be talking in greater detail about things we already know about and not a lot of ‘gee whiz’ new things.”

2. Broadwell powers converta-tabsOne of Intel’s biggest news announcements of the year came just a few weeks ago. The first versions of its next flagship processor, the 14nm Broadwell, are now shipping as the Core M for 2-in-1 notebook/tablets.

Intel’s Kirk Skaugen is formally releasing Core M at the IFA consumer event in Berlin Sept. 5. It’s Intel’s strongest play at the moment, powering fanless, thin-and-light x86 notebooks that turn into tablets, competing in a market increasingly dominated by ARM-based tablets that are starting to act like notebooks.

Way back at Computex in June Intel was already showing Llama Mountain, its reference design for the Core M systems. In Berlin IFA is already awash with Wintel tabs, some hitting price points as low as $120 using the Atom-based Bay Trail SoCs, and Microsoft’s new willingness to give away OEM copies of Windows in exchange of hopes for more eyeballs on Bing and its other online services.

Broadwell is all about lower power to enable Macbook Air and iPad-like designs, where all the action is. And that’s OK because “the x86 performance Intel offers is more than adequate for all but the most demanding mobile users,” says Brookwood.

As far as your conclusion that Quark is all talk and no news, I'd point out that to date it's ONLY been talk. What is significant is that you might actually be able to order a Quark chip in Q4.

Sure you could order a Galileo board six months after the IDF '13 splash (although you can't find them anymore), but near as I can tell there wasn't even an order code for the chip. If you look at intel.com, you can finally find a product brief and spec sheet -- they are dated August 2014. And the Edison SD form-factor Quark only showed up the once (CES?) and if you want to buy one you are bait-and-switched to an Atom (that no longer even fits in the SD form factor). The new Internet of Things Group (IoTG) at Intel has been talking about a gateway product based on Quark all year, but the only place to find it is as a video.

Here's to getting an actual product available a year later. If it finally happens, that *is* news.

The 14 nm node is interesting as it represents a shift back to logic being the process node leader. Flash memory has held that title for several years now. However, the current 16 nm/15 nm (the "1y" node) appears to be the second to last transition with 12 nm/10 nm (the "1z" node) expected to be the last planar scale. Logic scaling does seem to have some road ahead.